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20 thoughts on “The Web And Social Media”

You could do what Glenn does and take on 1 possibly two other persons to post topics of interest. They would have to be people who share your basic set of interests in what you want to see discussed here.

I am also a “conscientious objector” anent social media. I have zero presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and the rest of the soc-med zoo. I quit commenting over at Spaceflight Now when that site forced one to have a Facebook account in order to do so.

There are a couple reasons why Facebook and Twitter are more appealing for content publishers. There is the potential to reach a larger audience and publishing is easier.

Blogging, even by phone or on the wordpress app, is time consuming. You have to set up tags, photos, summaries, key words, ect. You have the choice not to but then the search engine robots don’t favor your content as much.

Facebook and Twitter are great for promoting. Facebook is better than Twitter for writing but Twitter is great for collecting other people’s content and then sharing it. A lot of blogging envolves sharing a link, a quote, and commentary. This is very easy on Twitter.

The blogging niche is original content and longer commentary that possibly takes several different links and weaves them together.

The challenge for a blogger is how to compete with Facebook and Twitter. I think the answer is to co-opt them. Facebook can be used to promote content and direct people away from Facebook to a site. Twitter can be used to promote and farm content links.

Twitter has a psychological effect on dopamine through the constant stream of information. This might be able to be replicated on a blog through a Twitter plug in on wordpress that auto refreshes or has a button to manually refresh.

Personally, I would like to see Rand’s tweets without having to go to twitter. I follow so many people on twitter, it just becomes noise and I’m not about to set up a couple hundred bookmarks to different account’s status.

I don’t think I could be making a straw man argument because I support Rand’s position, and merely want to strengthen his independent voice (regardless of how whether I disagree with his positions.) A straw man argument would be a misrepresentation of Rand’s position.

Does Rand have a position on net neutrality? I have no idea.

I’m not suggesting that the ISPs have ever tried to censor content, but I’m wondering why they won’t in the future. AT&T and Verizon provide Tier 1 services and also compete for cell phone customers. Aren’t they subject to the same political winds as Facebook? Again, I confess deep ignorance on this subject.

“This morning [23 April 2018], we learned that Google ads will no longer accept anything related to the [Christian Publishing House] domain. They stated the reason is because of the faith we expressed on our website.”

Bob, if you are going to make claims so easily debunked, perhaps Rand consider Google’s idea of not accepting anything from you because of the faith you express on his website? After all, your faith in Google is obviously misguided.

I’m pretty sure ISPs have tried censorship quite often, and many have gone out of business or close enough to be irrelevant, for example AOL. That said, peter, I think your claim of a straw man is valid considering the ignorance of bob on the subject. After all, he shows very little knowledge of the difference between an ISP and a search engine, and even less on the various means for transmitting data from point A to point B. Therefore, his debate tactic, that consists of telling others with knowledge of the subject that they are wrong, is certainly a straw man.

I think it is great that starting up an internet service provider is something even a small business can do. Free markets are great for allowing people to find goods and services that otherwise might be limited by large corporations wanting to control society for their fascists/socialist government supporters. Can you imagine if we lived in a communist country like China that regulates the internet?

I’m not a network guy, but I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. How many “internet service providers” will my comment pass through before it reaches Rand’s host, and then how many more will my comment pass through before it reaches your eyes? Lots of them, right? I’m referring to “the backbone of the internet” rather than the particular internet service provider that Rand pays for, or the one that you pay for.

I fully expect some sort of lecture on how the internet was designed to survive a nuclear war via massive redundancy, and I’m readily confessing ignorance on how the internet works, but what happens if all the Tier 1 companies (including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Quest, etc) decide that certain political ideas are really just too offensive for them to pass along.

About the same thing that happens when Google decides certain sites are to become invisible to its “search engine.” That, frankly, seems far more likely given the hive of deranged SJW’s Google seems rapidly devolving into.